Alumni

Eyewitness Report: UC Law’s NCAA Game!!

As a general rule, law students rarely get the chance to interact with their professors, outside of high-pressure in-class situations in which the professor usually expects the student to provide an intelligible answer in front of a classroom of peers. To rectify this, the Student Bar Association, along with several professors, planned a night full of entertainment and good-natured competition for both the student body and the faculty: a students-versus-professors basketball game, followed by a trivia contest at Woody’s.

The basketball game, held at UC’s Rec Center and complete with court-side bleachers for spectators, was at its core a fundraising effort for relief in Haiti. The rivalry was just for fun. In two halves of intense competition, both the students and the faculty showcased their considerable talent. For the law students, this meant demonstrating that they possess skills beyond reading case law and balancing life and law school; for the faculty it mostly meant demonstrating they could run up and down a court without falling down. This, however, wasn’t always the case!

The game was definitely entertaining. Many players on both teams were very talented, and the final result was not nearly as much of a blowout as may have been expected. The students triumphed over the faculty team by a score of 47 to 33. Although there were a few accidental collisions and fouls—and at one point a turnover prompted by a professor’s reminder to the student with the ball that she would be deciding what grade to give him—both teams exhibited good sportsmanship and everyone involved seemed to have a good time.

The teams themselves had a good mix of talent. On the faculty team were Professors Bai, Lenhart, Carroll, Smith, Steinman, Mossman, Lockwood, and Spring, as well as Bryan Weng, Sean Rhiney, and Kasun Samarasinghe. Representing the students were 3Ls Sean McBee, Rosina Caponi, Dave Sturkey, Brittany Musleve, and Erin Moosbrugger; 2Ls Sarah Sanderson and Kevin Gilles; and 1Ls Joe Sherman, Jon DeLong, Ryan McGraw, and Tiffany Allen. Assistant Dean Jim Schoenfeld helped out by serving as a fair and (theoretically) impartial referee, as did a 1L student.

Following the game, students, faculty, and spectators alike made their way back toward the law school and across the street to Woody’s bar. Woody’s hosts a trivia contest every Wednesday, and it was there that the faculty were able to exact their revenge on the students, despite the fact that there was primarily one team comprised of faculty and several student teams. After several rounds of competitive play, a lot of “smack talk” by several of the faculty team members, and even a few team name changes—including, at one point, “Joe Sherman Won’t Graduate”—the faculty were deemed the winners of the contest. As a result, they won a $50 bar tab—and a little redemption for the basketball game.